Cognitive biases in social phobia

Social phobics possess a variety of cognitive biases, including selective attentional, interpretive, and memory biases. Of these biases, the most important is probably the interpretive bias in which social phobics exaggerate the inadequacy of their social behaviour. There are two main reasons why this interpretive bias is maintained: (1) social phobics engage in safetyseeking behaviours, which limit the feedback about their social behaviour that they obtain from other people; and (2) social phobics attend to their own internal physiological symptoms, and use this information to infer how anxious they seem to others. An important part of cognitivebehaviour therapy should involve attempts to reduce to eliminate interpretive bias by decreasing social phobics use of safety-seeking behaviours and by altering their attentional focus from internal sensations to the reactions of others.